She is a woman with a dried up soul. Constant loneliness
is killing her. A casual acquaintance with a man
happens, whose wife is having affair with her husband.
This betrayal drives them to do things they didn''t dare
to do before. They are looking for something to build a
new life, but the fact of infidelity returns them again
and again to the past and drawn them into dark abyss.
And there''s no way out of it.

When a woman tells a man she barely knows that her
husband is having an affair with his wife, everything
starts to go out of whack in “Betrayal,” helmer Kirill
Serebrennikov’s troubling, formally complex study of
obsession. Anchored by incandescent perfs from German
thesp Franziska Petri and Macedonian actor Dejan Lilic,
both dubbed seamlessly into Russian, the film becomes
more entrancing as it goes along, though auds may have
trouble swallowing outrageous coincidences that, as with
Serebrennikov’s previous work, deliberately break with
realist rules of drama. Strong critical support will be
required for “Betrayal” to win trust offshore.

Pic’s austere strategy becomes gradually evident by the
time auds realize that they’re never going to find out
the name of the barely seen burg where the action is
set, or those of the characters, identified only by
pronouns in the credits.

The first few scenes set out to disorient and shock from
the off: A man (Lilic, largely a legit thesp in his
native Macedonia) arrives at a hospital for a routine
heart checkup with a doctor (Petri), who informs him in
the middle of his cardiogram that his wife is sleeping
with her husband. Angry and incredulous, he storms out,
but later speaks to the doctor at a bus stop that
suddenly gets plowed into by an SUV just moments after
they leave, killing three people — an effective symbol
for the devastation wrought by this humiliating personal
revelation.

At home, the man’s pretty young wife (pop singer-actress
Albina Dzhanabayeva) seems as cheerful and loving as
ever. The atmosphere is much chillier at the woman’s
home, where her husband (Andrei Shchetinin) regularly
comes home conspicuously late, and she’s taken to eating
handfuls of dirt in despair and masturbating mournfully
beside him while he sleeps.

After the woman gives the cuckolded husband a tour of
the spots where the illicit lovers meet for their
trysts, he accepts the truth. To reveal subsequent
events would spoil several of the film’s most startling
surprises; suffice it to say that things get
considerably weirder, while the script by Natalia
Nazarova and Serebrennikov defies auds to swallow
credulity-stretching character behavior (particularly
from a cop played by Guna Zarina) and coincidences that
would seem unlikely in a Russian fairy tale.

However, those familiar with Serebrennikov’s work
(especially his debut, “Ragin,” “Bed Stories” and his
underappreciated previous pic, “Yuri’s Day”) will be
aware that a certain amount of surreal narrative lunacy
is a vital part of the helmer’s m.o.; it’s as if his
characters’ inner psychology has shaped and distorted
the very fabric of reality. After the infidelity has
been revealed, the focus contracts painfully to just a
few characters caught up in spiraling patterns,
compelled to haunt the same places over and over, as
with the lovers using the same ill-fated hotel room
every time. Like the complexly coiffed hairstyles Petri
wears throughout (recalling Kim Novak’s in “Vertigo”),
the configurations keep shifting but everything is
ultimately wound up with tight aesthetic bobby pins, not
a hair out of place.

A similar waste-nothing principle governs the
performances, with the leads in particular underplaying
with a subtlety that’s on just the right side of
enigmatic. Petri, not well known beyond Germany, is a
particular revelation, mesmerizing throughout with her
piercing feline eyes and brisk hauteur.

Of the uniformly pro crew, ace Russian lenser Oleg
Lukichev (who also shot “Yuri’s Day” and Alexei German
Jr.’s “Gaspastum” and “The Last Train”) deserves
particular praise for his nervy but still fluent
handheld lensing in widescreen, making stylish use of
lens flares and shallow focus. Not since “The Battleship
Potemkin” has a Russian film rendered staircases quite
so menacing.
Variety